Code Review

As Gerrit is a code review tool, naturally contributions will
be reviewed before they will get submitted to the code base. To
start your contribution, please make a git commit and upload it
for review to the main Gerrit review server. To help speed up the
review of your change, review these guidelines before submitting
your change. You can view the pending Gerrit contributions and
their statuses
here.

Depending on the size of that list it might take a while for
your change to get reviewed. Naturally there are fewer
approvers than contributors; so anything that you can do to
ensure that your contribution will undergo fewer revisions
will speed up the contribution process. This includes helping
out reviewing other people’s changes to relieve the load from
the approvers. Even if you are not familiar with Gerrit’s
internals, it would be of great help if you can download, try
out, and comment on new features. If it works as advertised,
say so, and if you have the privileges to do so, go ahead
and give it a +1 Verified. If you would find the feature
useful, say so and give it a +1 code review.

And finally, the quicker you respond to the comments of your
reviewers, the quicker your change might get merged! Try to
reply to every comment after submitting your new patch,
particularly if you decided against making the suggested change.
Reviewers don’t want to seem like nags and pester you if you
haven’t replied or made a fix, so it helps them know if you
missed it or decided against it.

Review Criteria

Here are some hints as to what approvers may be looking for
before approving or submitting changes to the Gerrit project.
Let’s start with the simple nit picky stuff. You are likely
excited that your code works; help us share your excitement
by not distracting us with the simple stuff. Thanks to Gerrit,
problems are often highlighted and we find it hard to look
beyond simple spacing issues. Blame it on our short attention
spans, we really do want your code.

Commit Message

It is essential to have a good commit message if you want your
change to be reviewed.

Keep lines no longer than 72 chars

Start with a short one line summary

Followed by a blank line

Followed by one or more explanatory paragraphs

Use the present tense (fix instead of fixed)

Use the past tense when describing the status before this commit

Include a Bug: Issue <#> line if fixing a Gerrit issue, or a
Feature: Issue <#> line if implementing a feature request.

A sample good Gerrit commit message:

Add sample commit message to guidelines doc

The original patch set for the contributing guidelines doc did not
include a sample commit message, this new patchset does. Hopefully this
makes things a bit clearer since examples can sometimes help when
explanations don't.

Note that the body of this commit message can be several paragraphs, and
that I word wrap it at 72 characters. Also note that I keep the summary
line under 50 characters since it is often truncated by tools which
display just the git summary.

Style

This project has a policy of Eclipse’s warning free code. Eclipse
configuration is added to git and we expect the changes to be
warnings free.

We do not ask you to use Eclipse for editing, obviously. We do ask you
to provide Eclipse’s warning free patches only. If for some reasons, you
are not able to set up Eclipse and verify, that your patch hasn’t
introduced any new Eclipse warnings, mention this in a comment to your
change, so that reviewers will do it for you. Yes, the way to go is to
extend gerrit CI to take care of this, but it’s not yet implemented.

To format Java source code, Gerrit uses the
google-java-format
tool (version 1.6), and to format Bazel BUILD, WORKSPACE and .bzl files the
buildifier
tool (version 0.17.2).
These tools automatically apply format according to the style guides; this
streamlines code review by reducing the need for time-consuming, tedious,
and contentious discussions about trivial issues like whitespace.

You may download and run google-java-format on your own, or you may
run ./tools/setup_gjf.sh to download a local copy and set up a
wrapper script. If you run your own copy, please use the same version,
as there may be slight differences between versions.

When considering the style beyond just formatting rules, it is often
more important to match the style of the nearby code which you are
modifying than it is to match the style guide exactly. This is
especially true within the same file.

Additionally, you will notice that most of the newline spacing
is fairly consistent throughout the code in Gerrit, it helps to
stick to the blank line conventions. Here are some specific
examples:

Keep a blank line between all class and method declarations.

Do not add blank lines at the beginning or end of class/methods.

When to use final modifier and when not (in new code):

Always:

final fields: marking fields as final forces them to be
initialized in the constructor or at declaration

final static fields: clearly communicates the intent

to use final variables in inner anonymous classes

Optional:

final classes: use when appropriate, e.g. API restriction

final methods: similar to final classes

Never:

local variables: it clutters the code, and makes the code less
readable. When copying old code to new location, finals should
be removed

method parameters: similar to local variables

Code Organization

Do your best to organize classes and methods in a logical way.
Here are some guidelines that Gerrit uses:

Ensure a standard copyright header is included at the top
of any new files (copy it from another file, update the year).

Always place loggers first in your class!

Define any static interfaces next in your class.

Define non static interfaces after static interfaces in your
class.

Next you should define static types, static members, and
static methods, in decreasing order of visibility (public to private).

Prefer to open multiple AutoCloseable resources in the same
try-with-resources block instead of nesting the try-with-resources
blocks and increasing the indentation level more than necessary.

Wow that’s a lot! But don’t worry, you’ll get the habit and most
of the code is organized this way already; so if you pay attention
to the class you are editing you will likely pick up on it.
Naturally new classes are a little harder; you may want to come
back and consult this section when creating them.

Design

Here are some design level objectives that you should keep in mind
when coding:

ORM entity objects should match exactly one row in the database.

Most client pages should perform only one RPC to load so as to
keep latencies down. Exceptions would apply to RPCs which need
to load large data sets if splitting them out will help the
page load faster. Generally page loads are expected to complete
in under 100ms. This will be the case for most operations,
unless the data being fetched is not using Gerrit’s caching
infrastructure. In these slower cases, it is worth considering
mitigating this longer load by using a second RPC to fill in
this data after the page is displayed (or alternatively it might
be worth proposing caching this data).

@Inject should be used on constructors, not on fields. The
current exceptions are the ssh commands, these were implemented
earlier in Gerrit’s development. To stay consistent, new ssh
commands should follow this older pattern; but eventually these
should get converted to eliminate this exception.

Don’t leave repository objects (git or schema) open. A .close()
after every open should be placed in a finally{} block.

Don’t leave UI components, which can cause new actions to occur,
enabled during RPCs which update the DB. This is to prevent
people from submitting actions more than once when operating
on slow links. If the action buttons are disabled, they cannot
be resubmitted and the user can see that Gerrit is still busy.

GWT EventBus is the new way forward.

…​and so is Guava (previously known as Google Collections).

Tests

Tests for new code will greatly help your change get approved.

Change Size/Number of Files Touched

And finally, I probably cannot say enough about change sizes.
Generally, smaller is better, hopefully within reason. Do try to
keep things which will be confusing on their own together,
especially if changing one without the other will break something!

If a new feature is implemented and it is a larger one, try to
identify if it can be split into smaller logical features; when
in doubt, err on the smaller side.

Separate bug fixes from feature improvements. The bug fix may
be an easy candidate for approval and should not need to wait
for new features to be approved. Also, combining the two makes
reviewing harder since then there is no clear line between the
fix and the feature.

Separate supporting refactoring from feature changes. If your
new feature requires some refactoring, it helps to make the
refactoring a separate change which your feature change
depends on. This way, reviewers can easily review the refactor
change as a something that should not alter the current
functionality, and feel more confident they can more easily
spot errors this way. Of course, it also makes it easier to
test and locate later on if an unfortunate error does slip in.
Lastly, by not having to see refactoring changes at the same
time, it helps reviewers understand how your feature changes
the current functionality.

Separate logical features into separate changes. This
is often the hardest part. Here is an example: when adding a
new ability, make separate changes for the UI and the ssh
commands if possible.

Do only what the commit message describes. In other words, things which
are not strictly related to the commit message shouldn’t be part of
a change, even trivial things like externalizing a string somewhere
or fixing a typo. This helps keep git blame more useful in the future
and it also makes git revert more useful.

Use topics to link your separate changes together.

Process

Backporting to stable branches

From time to time bug fix releases are made for existing stable branches.

Developers concerned with stable branches are encouraged to backport or push
patchsets to these branches, even if no new release is planned.

Fixes that are known to be needed for a particular release should be pushed
for review on that release’s stable branch. It will then be included in
the master branch when the stable branch is merged back.

Updating to new version of GWT

When updating to a new version of GWT, there are several things that also need
to be updated or at least checked.

Update common and plugin dependencies in tools/gwt-constants.defs.

Update to the same GWT version in the cookbook plugin and optionally in other
plugins that have a dependency on GWT.

Update the GWT version in the archetype metadata in the
gerrit-plugin-gwt-archetype.

Update the version of gwt-maven-plugin in the example pom.xml file in
dev-plugins.

Update to the same GWT version in the gwtjsonrpc project, and release a
new version.

Finding starter projects to work on

We have created a
StarterProject
category in the issue tracker and try to assign easy hack projects to it. If in
doubt, do not hesitate to ask on the developer
mailing list.

Upgrading Libraries

Gerrit’s library dependencies should only be upgraded if the new version contains
something we need in Gerrit. This includes new features, API changes as well as bug
or security fixes.
An exception to this rule is that right after a new Gerrit release was branched
off, all libraries should be upgraded to the latest version to prevent Gerrit
from falling behind. Doing those upgrades should conclude at the latest two
months after the branch was cut. This should happen on the master branch to ensure
that they are vetted long enough before they go into a release and we can be sure
that the update doesn’t introduce a regression.

Deprecating features

Gerrit should be as stable as possible and we aim to add only features that last.
However, sometimes we are required to deprecate and remove features to be able
to move forward with the project and keep the code-base clean. The following process
should serve as a guideline on how to deprecate functionality in Gerrit. Its purpose
is that we have a structured process for deprecation that users, administrators and
developers can agree and rely on.

General process:
* Make sure that the feature (e.g. a field on the API) is not needed anymore or blocks
further development or improvement. If in doubt, consult the mailing list.
* If you can provide a schema migration that moves users to a comparable feature, do
so and stop here.
* Mark the feature as deprecated in the documentation and release notes.
* If possible, mark the feature deprecated in any user-visible interface. For example,
if you are deprecating a Git push option, add a message to the Git response if
the user provided the option informing them about deprecation.
* Annotate the code with @Deprecated and @RemoveAfter(x.xx) if applicable.
Alternatively, use // DEPRECATED, remove after x.xx (where x.xx is the version
number that has to be branched off before removing the feature)
* Gate the feature behind a config that is off by default (forcing admins to turn
the deprecated feature on explicitly).
* After the next release was branched off, remove any code that backed the feature.

You can optionally consult the mailing list to ask if there are users of the feature you
wish to deprecate. If there are no major users, you can remove the feature without
following this process and without the grace period of one release.